The days passed into weeks as my office got really busy, and I didn’t have time to think about much beyond paying my bills and feeding my cats. I barreled through the weeks leading up to the holidays with a complete lack of introspection and a whole lot of stress. It was almost like an additional part of the chemical cocktail circulating in my bloodstream. Red blood cells, platelets, sugar, caffeine from Starbucks, and stress from the latest government contract effort. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I couldn’t continue this way forever, but with the end point of “forever” being so endlessly far away, I wasn’t going to consider the consequences of working so hard for so long. My body had another plan for me, however, and suddenly, forever was today.
It started as a weird jolty pain on my left side, slightly above where my elbow would hit my body if I pressed my arm to my side. I thought I’d cut myself, and being one prone to accidents, I figured if I wasn’t light-headed from blood loss, I was fine. I put my hand to my torso, felt nothing, and carried on, firing off email messages from my office. The stabbing persisted. I shut my office door, and pulled my shirt out of my pants. It was bright red, scaly, and squarish, looking nothing like my skin. I had the distinct impression of Diana, the lizard alien lady in V, accidentally ripping her human mask and gasping that anyone should see her bright green alienness underneath. I wasn’t a man in a woman’s body—I was a Martian! How had this gone unnoticed for so long?
I noticed it was burning, and it did seem a little like a burn spot, but accessing my memory from the last 72 hours, I couldn’t recall when I’d done such a thing to myself. Scorching myself with a garment steamer, dripping hot grease from a fresh pizza on my arm, an unfortunate encounter with lighter fluid—none of those things had occurred recently. I tucked my shirt back in and went to the next office to ask my coworker what she thought it was. We had that level of intimacy, I suppose. She was everyone’s unofficial Jewish mother.
“Shingles, definitely,” she said to it, as if the spot itself had asked to be identified.
“What,” I said, confused, “isn’t that what old people get?”
“Well, how old are you,” she asked.
Insulting! “Not that old! Thirty-four is too young for SHINGLES.” I said it like we’d just discovered I had testicular cancer.
“Well, you should go to urgent care and get it checked out. My mother had shingles and she said it felt like someone had put a hot iron on her.”
“Thanks for making me feel better, Sandy,” I said, laughing at her.
* * *
“It’s shingles,” said the doctor, straightening up. “I’ll give you a prescription for Valtrex.”
“What’s that,” I asked, having never heard of this pill before.
“It’s an anti-viral. We give them to people with herpes.”
“But I don’t have herpes.”
“Shingles are in the same family.” He was not reassuring me here.
“You’re saying I have herpes on my chest?”
“No, no, you have shingles. Just get this filled today and keep taking them until the bottle is gone.”
I had visions of the pharmacist handing me the pills in a hazmat suit, telling everyone to stand back while he gave me the meds for my social disease.
The pills, in actuality, did little to nothing to make my death by invisible machete and hot poker feel any better. But I took them, even though I was pissed I wasn’t even getting the benefit of a placebo effect. A few days later, the Angry Red Blob Which Shall Not Be Named had disappeared, almost as suddenly as it had appeared.
* * *
I spent a copious number of hours searching online for anything related to shingles. On the symptoms front I obviously lucked out—there were people out there who looked like they’d had a long-term sexual relationship with a poison ivy plant. So my little area of distress was no big deal. I was struck, however, at the related conditions and causes, which included high stress levels and depression. Fifty hours at work each week, I knew I had stress. I didn’t need the National Institutes of Health to tell me that.
As if I needed more evidence, the phone rang. It was my primary care doctor. Dr. Min always made me smile, mostly because she had really crappy short-term memory and she owned more shoes than Imelda Marcos, which I had discovered in my third appointment with her, many years earlier. The first appointment had included the usual medical history inquiry.
“So, what kind of birth control are you using,” she asked, not looking up from her clipboard.
“I’m not using any birth control.” As far as I knew, no pregnancies had resulted from girl-on-girl action.
“Oh, so you’re not sexually active?” Why did medical school give people authorization to be rude?
“No, I’m sexually active.”
Then she looked up. “But you’re not using any birth control?”
“I’m gay,” I said, simply.
“Oh,” she’d said, simply. She made some sort of note on the form, which I imagined amounted to unabashed homosexual or its equivalent.
Fast forward to my second visit. Granted, this was a year later, my next physical. I didn’t expect her to actually remember me in the midst of seeing the 13,854 other patients she needed to counsel to make her malpractice insurance payments.
“Okay, what kind of birth control are you using?”
Really?
“I don’t need birth control,” I said, sighing. A whole year had passed but I was still annoyed.
“Are you trying to get pregnant?” That clipboard sure got a lot of eye contact from her.
“Nope. Just having sex for fun.”
“Uh,” she said, wondering why she hadn’t noted in my chart last year that I was a crazy person.
“I’m gay. I’m not having sex with men.”
“Oh, okay, gotcha.”
I twisted my ankle about eight months later—four days after my bad football tackle, I was still having trouble walking, so I made an appointment to see Dr. Min. She had her routine questions for me.
“Birth control? What are you using?” Jesus, this woman needed a much, much better patient history software system.
“Homosexuality. I’m using homosexuality. Works well, I might add.”
“Oh.” She seemed confused as to why I might answer in this way.
“How about you just write that on the top of my chart there? Do you have a red pen?”
Thankfully, she never asked me again.
Today she was calling with the results from my blood tests, which had been forwarded to her from the urgent care clinic. She wasn’t the kind of doctor to call unless there was a problem. Ergo, there was a problem.
“What’s up, doc,” I asked.
“You have a weak positive for mono. Have you been sick lately?”
My mind flashed back to me in bed at the end of December, flushed with sweat, too weak to pick up a gallon of milk, and begging for my death from any passersby who could hear me from the street two floors below.
“Yeah, I think so. About three months ago. I thought it was the flu.”
“That would be about right. So you had mono, and now you have herpes zoster.”
Would these people please stop talking about herpes? She was continuing to talk, despite my sudden bout of anger, saying, “your immune system is weak right now, and you need to take it easy.”
Taking it easy seemed like an impossible task. I was up to my ears at work, I was kind of breaking up kind of not with Pat, and I was getting ready to move to a new apartment since my landlord was selling the old one out from under me. I didn’t know where to begin on the taking it easy front.
“Okay, is there anything else, doc?”
“No, that’s it. I just want you to watch your stress level. Young people like you are not supposed to get shingles.”
“So I’ve been told. Okay, thanks for calling.”
Then it hit me that I should probably get a therapist.
